Report of a study which examined the English proficiency of 22 Arabic-speaking students enrolled in a low intermediate intensive English course at the American University of Beirut. (Author)

Revised and abridged version of You Can't Learn without Goofing (An Analysis of Children's Second Language Errors')'' to appear in Jack Richards (ed.), Error Analysis -- Perspectives in Second Language Acquisition,'' (Longmans). A goof'' is a productive error made during the language learning process. (RS)

The types of syntactic errors made by children learning a second language provide insight into the way in which children acquire the second language. The contrastive analysis hypothesis states that while the child is learning a second language, he will tend to use his native language structures in his second language speech; where there are…

This study tests three aspects of the problem of validity of contrastive analysis as a means for predicting errors or problems for second language learners: the constancy of foreign-language errors, the objectivity of the methods and procedures of contrastive analysis, and the capacity of contrastive analysis to make accurate predictions. Japanese…